Lost in Escalante

Confusion and Dehydration in the Utah Desert

The Bartender’s Advice

My cousin Jackson and I coasted into the Escalante, Utah, RV park after an eventful day in Zion National Park — a day that saw us climb two-point-something miles into the sky and inch across the edge of a cliff on the way to one of the most breathtaking views I have ever seen. By the time we climbed down, drove up the state to set up our tents and then took showers, we were ready to walk up the neon-lit street in search of food.

We stopped at a place called 4th West Pub and sat down at the bar. We both brought our phone chargers (the opportunities to juice up our phones were few and far between for a week) and Jackson brought his computer so we might watch the Georgia vs. Vanderbilt game. As the bartender handed us our beers, she asked how we were planning to fill the next day. When Jackson told her he planned on driving to the slot canyons and completing the three-mile hike, she knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Make sure you guys bring lots of water,” she said. “And make sure you stick to the trail.”

At that point, we had heard “bring lots of water” several times on our trip and we knew the possibility of dehydration wasn’t anything to mess with. Jackson knew this through what I assume is good sense and research, and I knew this because earlier that same day Jackson had to give me a third of his bottle of water as we made our way down Angel’s Landing. Having enough water was at the top of my list of priorities. It was the second part of her advice that we brushed aside too easily. The woman at the front desk of the RV park had given Jackson a map when he checked in, so we were looking at that as we ate our food at the bar. Well, he looked at it while I alternated between eating my nachos and checking my phone and watching Auburn beat Oregon. On paper, everything seemed simple enough.

There were some Oregon fans at a table a few feet away, which was a subtle reminder of just how far from SEC country I had ventured thus far. I found myself doing the unthinkable for any self-respecting Georgia fan: hoping Auburn would win the game simply to mark a victory for my side of the country.

Eventually, I asked Jackson about the plan for the next day and he handed me the map. Three pictures of the three slot canyons (Spooky, Peek-A-Boo and Dry Fork) caught my eye immediately. The pictures captured the canyons at what appeared to be the most perfect time of day and year for them to be the subject of a photograph. Oranges and browns and yellows and purples jumped off the page as they represented the chaotic scene of the narrow passageways, and they looked cool and breezy as sunlight crept inside instead of beating them down, unabated. My eyes followed the jagged lines of the wall of the canyon, and then I ventured from the pictures to the map that took up a large chunk of the paper. It was a loop trail, and it said the hike was slightly longer than three miles. We’d hike down into the desert basin, keep right, take a left at a certain tree, and then it would be obvious from there. Again, it sounded simple enough.

Before I handed the map back to Jackson, I read a warning on the bottom that gave information about flash floods. It said that getting caught in the middle of a slot canyon during a flash flood was unbelievably dangerous, and that we should check the weather before going on the hike.

We had barely seen clouds in the sky — let alone rain clouds — since I met him in Los Angeles, so we weren’t too concerned.

We finished our beers as Auburn’s Bo Nix led the Tigers to victory, much to the dismay of the fans in green and yellow that were sitting at the table a few feet away.

The Expensive Shirt and Bags of Ice

After a breakfast of instant coffee and dry blueberry-coated oatmeal, it was time to start our day.

We didn’t have to pack up our campsite since we would be returning that afternoon, so we cleaned up the breakfast materials, filled up our water bottles, changed clothes and then set on down the road.

We didn’t get far, though. Jackson wanted to stop and buy a map of where we were supposed to be going. I know that isn’t inherently a sign that things could go awry (and if anything, it might be a sign of the opposite), but the bottom line is that I failed to gage the complicated nature of navigation that this hike entailed, even though Jackson apparently had some idea.

We stopped at a gas station along the town’s single main road and we both went inside. It was the cashier’s first day on the job and she was visibly nervous. She told Jackson that she didn’t know where the maps were or if the gas station even sold maps, and then she apologized for not knowing. I walked around the store while Jackson thumbed through an assortment of reading materials by the front door. I grabbed a bag of ice for the cooler and paid for it as he continued to look, but as I put my debit card back into my wallet I turned to check his progress. He looked up and shook his head.

We got back in the car and began driving back up the road in the direction from which we came, but by the time I finished dumping the ice into the cooler we had already pulled into another store.

As soon as we got inside, we both saw a wall of maps ranging from the Escalante area to the entirety of Utah. Jackson found the one that he wanted for the day and paid for it while I was distracted by all the tee shirts and stickers and vests and jackets and socks.

I hadn’t planned on it, but I immediately knew I was going to buy something. I realized that I was fascinated by the word “Escalante” because it sounded like the name of a place that Waylon Jennings or Willie Nelson or Merle Haggard would sing about, as if it belonged in the pantheon of unassuming places like Luckenbach or Amerillo.

I found a shirt that I only kind of liked and I overpaid for it. And with that, our day began.

The Fork in the Trail

The drive to the hike was a simple one: turn right onto a dirt road and then stay on that dirt road — withstanding its violent dips and bumps as we went — for over 20 miles until we arrived at the trailhead.

Where the landforms of Zion National Park pulled our attention upward to the beautiful cliffs of red-orange and green against the pale blue of the clear sky, the drive down the bumpy dirt road drew my eyes out toward the Utah horizon. There were large fields on either side of the car as it bustled toward our destination, and there were mountains that seemed to spring up from the flat land in the distance.

The road eventually led us to a clearing with about eight to ten other cars. Jackson and I got out, laced up our hiking boots, applied sunscreen and chugged our red Gatorades, then we threw our bags on our backs and started walking.

“All black?” Jackson asked. “That’s pretty bold.”

I looked down and realized for the first time that I had grabbed the first dry-fit shirt I could find and threw it on, not paying attention to its heat-trapping qualities or the fact that I looked as though I was attending a desert funeral. I looked back up at him, then back toward the car. Was it really worth it to go back and change clothes?

I shrugged.

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s only three miles, and I’ve got plenty of water.”

I didn’t know it then, but I had just doomed myself. Never, never tell yourself that you’ve got plenty of water, especially when you’re about to go hike in the Utah desert where you have never hiked before. It’s true that I thought I had plenty of water — because I had maybe four liters for a three-mile hike — but I now believe the correct mindset to have going into a hike out there is “I’m prepared, but there’s no way I am actually anywhere near being prepared enough.”

More on that later, though.

We continued, past the other cars and toward the sign that marked the beginning of the trail. Jackson wrote our names in a book that was provided while I read the sign, and then we began the hike.

It was around 9:30 am, if I remember correctly, so it wasn’t too warm yet. I had my hat resting on my upper back with the strap hanging loosely around my neck as we began to descend down into a desert basin that I suppose had been carved out by a river, which was completely dry on this particular day when we eventually found it. The hike in was slow and methodical, but once we got to the bottom of the basin we enjoyed the shade of the large rock walls as we made our way closer to the first slot canyon.

On our way down, we passed a middle-aged couple as they were climbing back up the steep rocks and toward their car. They had two dogs with them — one large and one small — that bounded out in front of them with their tongues hanging out of their mouths.

A group of about four or five people wasn’t too far behind us on our way down, so while we didn’t hurry by any means, we did want to be sure to stay enough in front of them so the slot canyons wouldn’t become congested.

We wound through the seldom-marked trail and eventually emptied out into a dead end at the dry river basin, where a dead juniper tree lay directly in front of us. To our left was a tiny break between two rocky hills, and to our right the river wound around a hill to its left and disappeared in its shadow.

We both stopped. As Jackson pulled out his map, I looked both ways as I waited for him to come to a decision on which way to go. As I did so, I kept looking to my left at the opening in the rocks. It looked narrow, but I couldn’t decide if it was narrow enough for someone to fit through. As he continued to study the map, I figured I’d share my thoughts.

“Do you think that’s where we’re supposed to go?” I asked. As I took a sip of water I nodded my head toward the opening.

Jackson looked in that direction for a moment, then he looked back at his map. He looked back toward where we came, then back at his map again.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think we’ve walked far enough yet to make the turn. Maybe that’s where we end up.”

We both looked back at what we would eventually find to be Spooky Canyon, the first canyon that we planned to hike through, and we decided that it wasn’t where we were supposed to go. With that, we turned and hiked along the dried, muddy river with Spooky Canyon disappearing behind our backs as we ventured into the desert.

The Meaningless Map

Perhaps I was distracted by the satisfying crunch of my boots breaking the plates of dried riverbed, but we followed the river around its various twists and turns, looking out for the piles of rocks that marked the trail as we went. And we went for a while.

Eventually, we arrived at a canyon where the opening was almost completely blocked by a giant boulder. We climbed the rock to look into the canyon and found the same muddy terrain that we had been hiking through for some time, and we also saw a single pair of footprints that continued forward.

We had been alluding to the fact that we might be lost for some time now, so the footprints were a reassuring sign that forced us to continue on.

There was a large drop-off on the other side of the boulder, so we had to figure out the best way down. I walked along the left side and looked over the edge, only to find a steep and narrow cliff (about six feet high) with a pool of wet mud at the bottom. That wouldn’t do. We walked around the boulder and looked down the right-hand side, where we found a few rocks that could act as steps on the way down through an opening barely large enough for our heads to fit through.

(Here’s something that Jackson and I didn’t discuss but both understood at the time: when we are definitely lost but unwilling to admit it yet, and we see a pair of footprints leading in the direction that we are already going, and the only way to keep going is to squeeze your body through a tiny opening between a rock and a literal hard place, we are going to find a way to get through.)

While enjoying the breeze that tumbled through the walls of the canyon, we debated whether it was Spooky or Dry Fork. Silently, we wondered if it was either.

Once through, we followed the pair of footprints down the river until, to our surprise (and to our delight), we saw a small pile of rocks. The semblance of a trail distracted us from the fact that the footprints we were following had now disappeared completely.

We left the comfort of the dried up riverbed and began hiking through the desert terrain again. We wound through dust and brush and around corners, meeting the river again briefly and then abandoning it again as we continued on. The trail that we assumed was the trail led us into an opening filled with hundreds of yards of soft sand — the kind of soft sand where you feel every step in your calves as you fight to march forward. To our left, we saw a large mound of sand that cascaded from the rocky hill, and on the mound of sand was the imprint of something sliding down toward where we were standing.

In our heads (or in my head, at least) I rationalized the sliding evidence as proof that someone had been here recently, and that maybe we were on the right track, after all. So we continued on.

We didn’t get much farther before we saw paw prints in the sand heading in the opposite direction.

“I bet those are from that tiny dog we saw earlier,” Jackson said.

I agreed, because it meant that we had stumbled across something familiar. It meant that we were not marching where no other man had gone before.

What neither of us dared to bring to attention was the fact that the paw prints were not accompanied by two sets of footprints.

Still, we continued on.

By now, it was nearing 11:00 a.m. My water bottle was still about three-fourths full, but it was getting more and more difficult to keep myself from gulping the remaining water underneath the beating sun. My hat was firmly on my head by this point, so my hair was predictably sweaty. However, the parts of my body that were exposed to the sun — my legs and arms — were not sweaty at all. Or at least they were for a moment, before the sun evaporated the liquid straight off my skin.

There were still shadows around some of the turns, so as soon as we hiked across the football field of grueling, soft sand, we threw our backpacks to the ground. We sat down and caught our breath as we looked at our surroundings. We ate our lunch (formerly a well-crafted peanut butter and jelly, now a squashed ball of bread and condiments). As we regained strength through food, we also lost confidence in our previous decision making.

Jackson pulled the map out again and studied it. He looked confused. Then he pulled out a different map — the one he bought that morning — and studied it, too.

After a moment, I asked if I could see the first map. When he handed it to me, I lost all hope in what we had done so far.

It was, without a doubt, the least helpful map I have ever seen. While I had been distracted by the impressive and colorful pictures of the canyons the night before, I failed to see that the map (printed several years earlier) used directions like “turn at this tree” or “stay to the left of the hill” when pointing toward Spooky Canyon.

I handed the map back to him and we discussed our options as we finished our peanut butter and jelly bundles of mush.

Should we turn back and follow the path that we made for ourselves? Should we keep going and hope that we were actually on the right path and the destination was just around the corner?

As we sat in the shade and discussed and ate and commiserated, we realized a major obstacle that must have contributed to us losing our way: the rock walls and hills that lined the river bed.

Since climbing down into the desert basin at the beginning of our hike, our perception of where we were and how far we had gone was skewed by our inability to see anything beside us except for red rock. Of course we kept going longer than we should have, because every step we took and every turn we made looked exactly the same as the one before it.

With that realization, we hatched an idea.

The Vertical Escape Plan

From our seat in the shade, we could see a sandy hill leading to the rocky terrain above us.

It wasn’t like the steep, rock walls that had lined our path so far — it was climbable. From where we sat and the predicament that we found ourselves in, it looked as though it should be climbed.

“Don’t you think our best bet right now is to get up high?” I asked. “If we can find a way to get up there, we should be able to see where we are. Maybe we’ll see where we’re supposed to be.”

Jackson looked up and followed my eyes, and then agreed. We finished our slobs of peanut butter and jelly, drank some water, and then put our bags back on our backs and began walking again.

When we got to the base of the hill, the difficulty of the climb became evident. I thought we would be able to simply walk up the slope with ease, or maybe zig zag our way up if we needed to, but I quickly realized my misunderstanding of the situation. Much like the distance we had just finished marching through — the part that took more leg strength than I actually had — this sand was soft. Trying to walk right up the mound quickly turned into sinking into the sand and then slowly sliding back down.

I was thirsty, out of shape, and angry at the sun. As I watched my foot sink into the loose sand, I was about to lose all hope.

At that moment, Jackson leapt onto the mound and started sprinting upward. His legs moved rapidly as his body slowly made any vertical progress, kind of like Scooby-Doo characters when they move their legs before they actually begin to run, but eventually he was ten or fifteen feet up the hill.

Not wanting to have hatched the idea and then immediately abandon it, I followed suit. We exerted an unbelievable amount of energy to move ten feet, and then we (I) paused to catch my breath before giving everything I had to move the next ten feet. It was a cycle that churned over and over until we finally got to a rocky surface that made up the rest of the hill.

The solid ground was a welcome sight, but we still had to scale the sloping rock to get to the top.

For the entirety of the trip, Jackson hiked much faster than I did. From our first day in the Zion narrows to the last day in Rocky Mountain National Park (especially in Rocky Mountain National Park), he marched ahead with intention. I would often fall behind, either because I’m out of shape or because I liked to take in my surroundings instead of sprinting past them, or it was a combination of the two (who am I kidding, it was definitely the first one).

More often than not, though, I would expend more energy than I should have in order to keep up with my speed-walking cousin. Climbing to the top of the hill while we were indefinitely lost in the desert was not one of those times, though. I don’t think my body would have let me keep up with him if I wanted to, but it was okay because I didn’t really want to. I wanted to catch my breath. I wanted to drink cold water. I wanted to sit down.

As he climbed ahead and marched onward, I fell behind but made sure he was always within sight. I figured he would look around at all the places that weren’t where we needed to go so that I wouldn’t have to, and then he’d let me know when he found an avenue worth pursuing.

(I’m not proud of the laziness associated with this plan, but the circumstances demanded it. When you get lost in the desert and you climb up a steep hill of what I can only assume is quicksand, and you are with a cousin that is visibly better at hiking than you are and then you develop a better plan, let me know.)

To my horror, getting to the top of the hill did not reveal much about where we were in relation to where we were supposed to be. I didn’t expect a sign at the top that read “Lost? Head in this direction to Spooky Canyon!” or anything, but I did expect some clarity. We had apparently hiked much farther than I originally thought.

Despite the lack of clear direction, we walked onward. We walked past dead trees and shrubs and cacti, and we walked up large rocks and on the edges of steep cliffs, all to find some evidence of where we were supposed to go.

“Are you staying hydrated?” Jackson called back from about 30 feet ahead of me.

I hadn’t been, really. I was so scared of running out of water that I kept telling myself to walk just a bit farther before getting a drink so that I could preserve as much as possible.

“Yep,” I answered back, as I reached around my back and grabbed my water bottle from the side pocket of my bag.

We kept walking toward what we assumed was the direction of where we started. The fact that we were looking for especially narrow slot canyons made our search even more difficult, seeing as tiny slivers in the vast land of rust-colored rock were not easily visible from far away. While we didn’t find the slot canyons from atop the hills, we did find something else.

There was a boulder wedged between two cliffs, and as we walked along the cliff’s edge, we recognized exactly where we were: the canyon we walked through earlier as we followed the single set of footprints. Our goals quickly shifted from finding a sign of something familiar to somehow getting down from our high vantage point. The conditions for our hike to the top were rare (which is why we took advantage of the opportunity at the time), as we were now stuck at the top of a steep cliff.

We kept walking, and eventually the rock sloped in a way that allowed us to safely venture down to around seven or eight feet from the ground, where there was another steep dropoff. We both stared at the ground for a while, then at our place on the rock. For almost a minute, we silently tried to figure out a way down. There was no way we were going to get seven or eight feet from a familiar place and then not be able to reach it. No way.

Jackson kept venturing closer and closer to the edge, where there was an indention in the rock large enough to sit on. To the right, there was a slope that ran straight down to the sandy ground. In between, however, there was nothing but vertical rock.

As I poured some water from my two-liter water pouch into my water bottle and took a sip, Jackson ventured down and sat in the indention in the rock, trying his hardest to will an escape into existence. He turned this way and that, looked to his left then to his right, tried to put his foot here then tried it there, but nothing seemed to work.

“Let’s just walk a little more,” I said. “I bet there’s an easy way down once we go a bit farther.”

Jackson didn’t look up. From where he was, he was so close to the ground that we both knew he wasn’t going to walk any farther.

“If there was just a foothold right here, I could easily walk down the thing,” he said. “I wonder if I could just jump from here.”

The pessimist in me didn’t love that idea. I was already envisioning a scenario in which I passed out and baked in the beating sun before we found our way out, and now I was envisioning having to carry Jackson and his broken ankle all the way out of the canyon as my water levels plummeted, all because he thought a seven-foot free fall would be a fine idea.

“I don’t think so,” I said, already knowing that a jump was imminent.

He kept looking around, practicing the scenario in his head. He worked out a plan that involved jumping from the indention, running along the side of the rock, and then pushing off with his leg so that he’d land in the soft sand. He told me the plan. I told him it might work but it also might not (I’m very helpful in crucial moments like these). I also told him about my fear that hurting himself to the point where he couldn’t walk on his own may be the worst possible thing he could do right now.

It was decided, he was going to do it.

I took his phone and his bag and then sat back down where I had been the whole time. The rocks were hot, and the sunlight seemed to pulse as we sat still for a moment. He kept looking at the rock in front of him and preparing as if he were about to go, and then stopping to think about it just a bit more. We probably waited there for ten minutes.

“This is a good idea, right? I mean we’re right here.”

“Jackson, I have been very vocal about my disagreeing with this idea.”

“Oh, right.”

He was quiet for a moment, and then without much warning, he leapt from the indention and took three or four quick steps along the rock wall before jumping down into the sand, where his momentum took him about twelve more steps. He looked up with wide eyes and a wider smile, and then he looked back at what he had just done.

“That sand is not nearly as soft as I thought it would be,” he said with a laugh.

I tossed his bag down for him to catch (which, with the heaviness of the bag and the whole gravity-causing-it-to-gain-momentum thing, was like catching a bowling ball, he said). Then, I walked a little farther as I had originally suggested. Over the next hill was an easy walk down.

Once we met back up, we were tasked with choosing a way to go. As we looked at maps and theorized about where we were, Jackson saw something. There, leading in the direction of the footprint canyon that we walked through earlier, a small pile of rocks marked the continuation of a trail.

We were so confused. Should we keep walking back toward the beginning of the trail in hopes of finding a place that we know is the right direction, or should we follow this pile of rocks in the direction that got us lost in the first place? Maybe we were still on the right path at this point in our hike the first time through, and maybe it was only much later that we made our grave mistake. Maybe the rocks were still our best bet. But then again, maybe they were what led us astray in the first place.

“I mean, I know it’ll be annoying if I’m wrong, but I think we should just keep heading back toward the car,” I said. “If this is the trail, at least we’ll know for sure.”

Jackson didn’t say anything. We both looked toward the direction of the trailhead that led back to his car, then we looked back toward ole’ footprint canyon and the invitation to retrace our steps.

“Of course, then there’s this whole ‘pile of rocks’ thing … ”

The Familiar Trail

For the second time that day, we ventured down the right side of the boulder and into the canyon. Unlike last time, we were also accompanied by our own footprints from earlier.

We crunched through the dry river just as we had before, then we again left the river for a trail through rock and brush, then we trudged through the unforgiving soft sand for the second time that day — following our own old footprints with every step.

It was around 12:30 p.m. now. Even if we hadn’t had our phones available to check the time, the hot, beaming sun overhead and the lack of available shadows as a result would have made the time of day abundantly clear. I kept drinking water as the sun kept stealing sweat off my arms and neck, and we kept walking. Eventually, we came to the same mound of dirt that we had struggled to scale earlier in the day.

“What do you want to do now?” Jackson asked as we both took a sip of our precious remaining water.

There was another hill blocking what was around the corner were we to walk a little bit farther, which intrigued me. I wondered if I had abandoned ship just one turn too early when I first suggested we seek higher ground.

“I still think maybe we should double back,” I said. “But if you want to just walk around this corner to be sure, I’d be down.”

(I cannot stress enough how unhelpful I am when it comes time to make a critical decision.)

After some quick deliberation, we decided to keep going. We ventured around the corner, then around another corner. Finally, we came to a convergence of two giant, rocky cliffs, but a sand dune blocked our visibility of the meeting of the two landforms.

We thought it might be the site of the slot canyon (at long last!), so we made a deal to venture around the dune and see if a narrow opening awaited on the other side. If there was no such opening, we would turn back.

We made our way around the dune, flanked on either side by yellow, rocky walls. The sand was softer than ever, but the promise of success overpowered the weakening of my calves as we excitedly hiked along. Finding the trail — especially here of all places — would be like finding a needle in a haystack. And not finding it here would be devastating.

Of course, there was nothing on the other side except solid rock.

After we both expressed our disappointment in words that I will excuse from inclusion in this story, we tossed our bags into the sand and sat in the shade of the large sand dune. It was around 1:00, and my two-liter pouch of water was a little less than half full. It, along with whatever was in my bottle, was the only water I had for the rest of the day.

Despite that harrowing fact, I had a snack of beef jerky (a snack that almost requires gulps of water afterwards) as Jackson ate some of the trail mix that he brought. We were quiet for a bit, mostly to catch our breath for the long walk ahead but also because there aren’t many words to exchange after sharing such monumental disappointment. Silence for a few minutes is the only thing that will really do the trick.

During that silence, Jackson pulled out the map again. As I thought about things like cold water and lazy afternoons enjoyed in air-conditioning, he studied the map and then looked up at the yellow rock walls.

“Ohhhh …” he said, still looking at the map.

“What is it?

“This must be Brimstone Gulch,” he said. “We must have left Spooky Gulch completely.”

Then he tossed the map my way before taking a sip of his water.

I won’t pretend to understand the psychology behind this, but actually seeing how far out of the way we had already walked for no reason was one of the most deflating experiences I’ve ever had. Knowing where we were didn’t give me any satisfaction at all, it just quantified how stupid I felt.

(I am about nine miles too stupid, if that makes sense)

If that weren’t enough, what Jackson said next was even worse.

“You know, I think that canyon you saw at the beginning of the hike was probably Spooky, after all.”

I had completely forgotten about that first fork in the road that we came to earlier when I saw something that looked like a slot canyon but decided to keep going anyways. We were right there, and somehow chose to instead embark upon two laps through the desolate desert under the close watch of an ever-warming sun. And I was the one that saw it! I was the one who could have saved the day, and instead, I said “nah, let’s keep going instead of even walking closer to get a better look.”

I took a gulp of water. With the combination of my aching calves, my beating chest, my emptying water bottle and the boiling sun, I could have hung out in the shade for hours. Luckily, after five minutes or so, Jackson stood up.

He didn’t say “get up” or “let’s go” or anything, but I also wasn’t going to continue just laying there after he got prepared to hike again. So up I went, and we traversed back toward the trailhead once again. This time, we walked past the four sets of footprints left behind by our earlier adventures. It was a humbling sight.

Finally, after marching through the sinking, soft sand again and chrunching back through the dried river bed and squeezing past the boulder at the base of ole’ footprint canyon and then bouncing from shade to shade, we found it: Spooky Canyon.

From there, it was a beautiful hike.